The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Congrats to Mark Zuckerberg and the whole Facebook team on their IPO filing. You've not only built a large and extremely profitable business but an awesome company culture!

Today we’re taking that a step further, enabling you to share recommendations with the world right in Google’s search results. It’s called +1—the digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool.” To recommend something, all you have to do is click +1 on a webpage or ad you find useful. These +1’s will then start appearing in Google’s search results.

As everyone on the interwebs knows, Google launched its +1 product today - a competitor to the Facebook Like button. I have seen a lot of analysis from tech blogs, but none of them speak to one fundamental problem with +1... no one (at least no one that doenst work at Google) has a "real" Google profile. Of course if you use Gmail you automatically have *a* Google profile. But it rarely contains much more than your name and gmail address. Most of them don't even have pictures and probably a tiny tiny % have any more personal content such as age, gender, location, interests etc. So yeah you can click +1 on search results and soon on web pages, and sure Google can use your own +1 clicking pattern to show you some level of relevant content and ads but I can't imagine it will be nearly as personalized as what the Facebook Like button and APIs can provide by leveraging rich personal data, and your full social graph. Of course Facebook is lacking Google serp - still the most powerful web page out there.

There is another problem with the incompleteness of Google profiles and that is potential "+1 fraud". (I get credit for coining that term.) Once +1 for web pages has launched, what's to stop your average SEO agency from hiring unemployed or underpaid workers to set up Google "profiles" (since they amount to little other than a gmail address) and go around +1'ing their clients' web pages to drive them up in search? See Facebook can pretty easily spot and disable "fake" accounts (and does so regularly) because the average FB profile has 120 friends, does a certain number of status updates a week, etc etc. On the other hand Google profiles of "real" and "fake" people probably look very similar... Any ideas on how Google is planning to deal with this problem?

The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

.

Great article by Malcolm Gladwell on the role of social media networks (or lack thereof) in activism today. I completely agree with many of his points. In my own (minor) experience... during the 2008 elections when Prop 8 was on the ballot, the facebook page for "No on Prop 8" collected something like 1.5million "Likes" (or as it was called back then "Fans".) But the one protest rally that was held at various city halls across California on Nov 15 had nowhere close to that level of attendance. I was there at SF City Hall along with maybe ~2000 other people. Its very easy to "Like" on a cause on Facebook or retweet an interesting tweet. Its a whole different level of commitment to actually go *do* something about it.